Masks of Happiness

| Why real satisfaction requires purpose and transcendence

By Michael Phillip

Complicated Creatures

When my darling cat is splayed out in a warm flesh puddle on my lap purring the post-dinner hour away. I truly believe she is happy. When I’m running down a wooded path with my family’s precious yet insane golden retriever off-leash (him not me), I’m quite certain he’s filled with lupine joy.

When the subject turns to human happiness, however, the waters muddy considerably. We seem to have misplaced our capacity for that sort of pure single-minded joy. We probably left it on the same rung of the evolutionary ladder that sparked self-awareness. Whenever it was that meta-cognition, that is, the ability to think about our thoughts, kicked in.

I don’t mean to imply that we’ve been completely ripped from Eden or that there’s no distillate of happiness for us to experience. It’s just that it, like everything humans do, is cloaked in layer after layer of context, confusion, and nuance.

Just as a spider spins a web or a bee builds a hive, humans think about thoughts. It’s in our nature. Consider the following words — Prognosticating, imagining, daydreaming, conceptualizing, worrying, hoping — Right there, that’s a half dozen distinct flavors…